Wednesday, July 30, 2008

This isn't an art post, but rather a post telling a story that spans the past two weeks.

My brother Jon, having just obtained a copy of Death Cab for Cutie's newest album, told me that I have to download it. I told him that I had never really listened to anything but their singles, and the singer's side-project, The Postal Service. He raved about how great it is... telling me the lyrics are so clever. I took his advice, went home, and downloaded the two latest CDs by Death Cab, since I knew a few songs from their album before their latest.

At least, that's what I thought I was downloading. And that's what I continued to think until just about 25 minutes ago. See, the older CD, Plans, was the correct album... I liked it, and it's now at least in my top 50 albums. I figured, "I'm experienced now, I can handle their new stuff."

So, I move on to what I thought was their newest album, Narrow Stairs. I hated it. Every bit of it was awful the first four times I listened to it. On the fifth try, something clicked. I liked it. Not once did I suspect there was anything odd about the cd, except maybe that I didn't see how Jon thought the lyrics were anything remarkable.

Well there WAS something odd about the cd. As I looked up the lyrics tonight, I realized none of the lyrics my eyes were seeing matched the words my ears were hearing... with exception to the single from the album.

It turns out, whoever I downloaded this album from took an album by a band called Velveteen, changed all the song names to the songs from Narrow Stairs, and changed the Id3 info for each of the songs (thus making them appear to be songs from Narrow Stairs). They then grabbed the single from Narrow Stairs, I Will Possess Your Heart, and threw it all together to appear as the actual Death Cab album.

I have been listening to a fraud for two weeks... and I have grown to love it! I just finished downloading an actual copy of Narrow Stairs, and I'm glad to say that I'm diggin' it. But still, I feel the same way I would if someone got a hold of my credit card number. I feel genuinely cheated.

As far as I can tell, this is the only flaw in file sharing. Ever.

EDIT: Turns out, tons of people have the same copy I did... and tons of people think it's the real thing. Sucks for them.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

In an effort to get myself drawing more, I plan on updating this thing at least three times per week with about an hour's worth of work. Most of what you'll see on here will be sketches, like what you see above, but further down the line I might add some paintings, photography, or photo manipulations. I might even give you previews of works in progress. Who knows?

The main point is that you'll get to see the stuff that will never make it to my site... now don't you feel special?